Whether or not Saturday Night Live will prove to be a success in the UK is still up in the air, as there are still the majority of the first season's eight episodes yet to debut. What we do know is that if it eventually crumbles and flops, it won't be because it wasn't funded well enough.
A new report from Variety claims that each episode of SNL UK has a whopping budget that comes in at around £2 million, making for a first season that will set Sky back around £16 million. That's quite the investment for a comedy series.
This mega pricing does take into account the fact that the show has exclusively bought the largest studio in London's Television Centre for the eight-episode season, the venue that otherwise plays host to The Graham Norton Show, which is on hiatus until the autumn now.
It should be said that compared to SNL in the United States, the budget is still considerably smaller (each episode of the US show is claimed to cost around £3 million), but compared to what Brits are used to when it comes to investment in comedy sketch shows, SNL UK's budget is a behemoth that very, very few can and have ever matched.
What are your thoughts on SNL UK so far?